Pages

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Return to Nepal: Radio Broadcasting from Mt. Everest

(Mt Everest (wikipedia)

At
the time of the twin major earthquakes in the Himalayan country of Nepal
recently, their famous mountain, Mount Everest, featured in the events that
took place. Somewhere around a thousand
people were on or near Mount Everest at the time of the first shake on April
25, and helicopters flew in to rescue those who were stranded, and to convey
the wounded and injured to hospital.It
is probable that the total death toll on the mountain, amounting to 200 or
more, will never be known.

Mount Everest is known as Sagarmatha
by the people of Nepal, and as Chomolungma by the people of Tibet. Under the early British colonials in India,
the mountain was identified on maps simply as B, and subsequently as Peak XV
(15). In 1865, the mountain was named
Everest in honor of Sir George Everest, the prominent Welsh Surveyor-General of
India towards the middle 1800s.

Mount Everest itself is not a
single, isolated mountain. Instead it is
a high peak among a multitude of high peaks in the ranges of the Himalaya
mountains that separate India from the Chinese areas of Central Asia. This mountain in total stands at about 5½miles
above mean sea level.

The officially recognized
international border between Nepal and Tibet in China runs right across the
summit of Mount Everest, and right up there the wind speed can sometimes reach
200 miles an hour. The measurements from
a GPS unit on the summit of Mount Everest indicate that the mountain is gaining
an increase in height at the rate of one foot every five years, and it moved
sideways for a distance of 1½inches due to the
recent earthquakes.

Over a period of more than 2½centuries,
several major attempts have been made to calculate the exact height of Mount
Everest and these figures vary from 29000 feet up to 30,200 feet. The standard accepted figure these days of
29,029 feet was established in 1955 by the Survey of India, though an
unofficial 29,141 feet is gaining popularity.

The original staging ground for
attempts at climbing Mount Everest was in the wide open area in front of the
Adventist hospital at Banepa, though in more recent time, a base camp has been
established much closer to the formidable mountain itself.

During the past nearly 100 years,
many attempts have been made to climb right up to the summit of Mount Everest,
and nearly 7,000 people have been successful, though the attempts have resulted
in more than 200 deaths. It is thought
that the first known successful attempt at climbing Mount Everest might have
been by George Mallory and Andrew Irvine on June 8, 1924, though both men
perished in a massive storm next day.

In 1953, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and
New Zealander Sir Edmund Hilary made the first successful and verified climb of
Mount Everest. While on the climb,
Hilary carried a shortwave receiver and he tuned in to the
Commercial Service of Radio Ceylon for programming and news. He reported that the signal strength from the
transmitters at Ekala was excellent; the programming came in loud and clear.

The first radio broadcast
from Mount Everest took place in March 1937.
At the time, a German expedition was making a climb to the summit and an
essential part of their equipment was a transmitter and receiver; and in those
days, it had to be of Telefunken manufacture.

The German expedition made three
attempts to achieve the summit, but without success. When they reached the 23,000 foot level on
their final attempt, an avalanche killed seven team members and nine Nepali
porters, though the team leader himself, Herr Wyiez, escaped serious injury.

This German team made several radio
broadcasts from Mount Everest which were on the air in the 19 m band. QSL cards were issued from Das Deutsche
Funkhaus in Berlin, though it is doubtful if any have survived over the
intervening years.

Then, in 1953, there was another
German expedition to Everest, and once again, they took a set of Telefunken
equipment with them for the purpose of making radio broadcasts from the
mountain to listeners back home in Germany.

Give another quarter century again
and Germany was once more involved in another series of radio broadcasts from
Mount Everest, though this time it was a joint project in co-operation with
France. Early in the year 1979, a seven
member team from the two European nations carried a portable transmitter from
which they made periodic broadcasts describing their onward progress towards
the summit.

These
mountain broadcasts were picked up on a receiver at the French embassy in
Kathmandu, and then uplinked to Symphonie, the Franco-German satellite over the
Indian Ocean. This programming was then
fed into the local and international radio services in both France and
Germany. From the summit, they described
the expansive panorama into India and China as breathtaking.

Canada has also been involved in
similar mountaineering projects at Everest, and they established a complete TV
studio in the Hotel Everest Sheraton in Kathmandu from where TV programming was
satellited to homeland audiences in Canada, as well as to the BBC in London and
NHK in Tokyo. To accomplish this series
of TV relay programs, it required 300 porters to carry all of the the TV
equipment to Base Camp at Mount Everest.

Handheld 2 metre amateur radio
equipment has also been utilized for communication between Everest climbers and
their various encampments, including for example a South African team in
2007.

In addition, the Everest scenario
has been attached to three different attempts at Nepali radio
broadcasting. The World Radio TV
Handbook for 1963 carried a half page advertisement on page 50 for a new
commercial radio broadcasting service that was planned for installation in
Nepal.

A radio broadcasting company, which
was registered in Zurich Switzerland as the Himalayan Broadcasting System, made
an announcement extraordinary stating that they planned to launch their new “Voice
of the Himalayas”in Nepal sometime during the years
1963 and 1964. Commercial programming
from Nepal would be beamed to Asia and the Middle East in ten languages.

That was all that was ever revealed
about the powerful new “Voice of the Himalayas”,
a project that would rival the Commercial Service from Radio Ceylon if it ever
came to fruition. It would seem then
that the Nepali government never granted a license for this ambitious project.

In 1996, a Nepali consortium
launched an FM station in Kathmandu under the slogan Radio Sagarmatha, their
name for Everest. Initially this station
was on the air without a license, though during the following year, the
government did issue a license, which required a reduction in power down to 100
watts.

Then, a shortwave program station
was launched in London in April 2001 as Radio Everest. Programing was produced by the Nepali
community living in England and it was broadcast as a one hour segment four
evenings a week from a 100 kW transmitter of ORF on 7235 kHz at Moosbrunn in
Austria. Due to insufficient funding,
Radio Everest folded ten months later, though they did issue a very attractive
QSL card, picturing as you might expect, Mount Everest.